Free Ebook Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem
Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem. Learning to have reading behavior is like discovering how to attempt for eating something that you really do not really want. It will certainly require even more times to help. Moreover, it will also bit make to serve the food to your mouth and ingest it. Well, as reviewing a book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem, sometimes, if you must read something for your new works, you will really feel so woozy of it. Even it is a book like Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem; it will make you really feel so bad.
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem
Free Ebook Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem
Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem. The established innovation, nowadays support every little thing the human needs. It consists of the day-to-day activities, tasks, office, amusement, and also a lot more. Among them is the wonderful web link as well as computer system. This condition will reduce you to support among your leisure activities, reviewing behavior. So, do you have ready to read this publication Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem now?
Exactly how can? Do you think that you do not require enough time to go for buying e-book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem Never mind! Merely rest on your seat. Open your device or computer system as well as be on-line. You can open up or see the web link download that we provided to obtain this Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem By by doing this, you can get the online e-book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem Checking out the book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem by on the internet can be actually done easily by conserving it in your computer and gadget. So, you can continue each time you have downtime.
Checking out guide Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem by on the internet could be additionally done quickly every where you are. It appears that waiting the bus on the shelter, waiting the checklist for queue, or other areas feasible. This Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem could accompany you during that time. It will not make you really feel bored. Besides, by doing this will also enhance your life high quality.
So, just be here, locate the book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem now as well as read that rapidly. Be the very first to read this book Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem by downloading and install in the link. We have other publications to review in this internet site. So, you can find them additionally effortlessly. Well, now we have done to provide you the very best e-book to review today, this Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem is really ideal for you. Never overlook that you need this publication Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem to make better life. Online publication Moneywood: Hollywood In Its Last Age Of Excess, By William Stadiem will truly offer simple of every little thing to review and take the advantages.
As wild and sexy and over the top as the decade author William Stadiem brings to life, Moneywood is the inside story of Hollywood producers in the '80s.
From box office hits like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Batman to film flops like Heaven's Gate, Howard the Duck and Leonard Part 6, Hollywood was never more excessive than it was in the 1980s. In this, the Moneywood era, the industry purse strings were not controlled by reasonably consenting adults but by pop culture cowboys who couldn't balance their own checkbooks. What they could do was sweet talk the talent, seduce the starlets, snowball the Japanese and slither out of Dodge when the low grosses trickled in. Their out of control lifestyles and know-nothing, raging narcissistic personalities make the original brutal studio heads like Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner seem like Oxford dons. Yet, for all their entertainment flops, these Scoundrels of Spago turned movies into a Big Business that was catnip to Wall Street. They were The Producers, and they were way beyond anything Mel Brooks could dream up.
The Moneywood cast of characters includes:
-Simpson and Bruckheimer; Guber and Peters; Eisner/Katzenberg/Ovitz: the marquee teams of the era
-Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, the Rambo boys, who went from making wigs to making blockbusters.
-David Begelman, the embezzler, gambler and sex addict who was rewarded for his sins by getting to run both Columbia and MGM.
-David Puttnam The high-toned English advertising whiz who was supposed to raise the Hollywood bar, but ended up barred from Hollywood.
Moneywood is the ultimate expose of the real hit men of Hollywood's go-go decade.
- Sales Rank: #3044724 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-21
- Released on: 2014-01-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.86" h x .93" w x 7.14" l, .87 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
About the Author
WILLIAM STADIEM is the author of eight books, including the bestselling Marilyn Monroe Confidential; Dear Senator; and Mister S: My Life with Frank Sinatra. A Harvard JD-MBA, he abandoned Wall Street for Sunset Boulevard, where as the screenwriter for Franco Zeffirelli's Young Toscanini, he wrote one of the biggest flops of the 80s. As a screenwriter, a columnist for Andy Warhol's Interview, and the restaurant critic for Los Angeles, Stadiem has enjoyed a ringside seat for the decadence and outrageousness he recounts in Moneywood. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
�
CAPITAL HILL
WITH THE EXCEPTION of the McCarthy witch hunt, the public face of Hollywood had never before seemed as Republican as it did on the night of January 19, 1981. The scene was the ball celebrating the next day’s inauguration of America’s first “Hollywood” president, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan had been California’s first Hollywood governor. His way had been paved by the state’s first Hollywood senator, song-and-dance man (and, incongruously, Yale man) George Murphy. Reagan in turn would pave the way for California’s second Hollywood governor, strong-and-death man Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both Murphy and Schwarzenegger were, coincidentally, also Republicans.
But that was California, which was on the cutting edge, and this was America, which for all its fascination with the silver screen was always wary of liberal, Jewish, bleeding-heart, foreign-seeming, and overwhelmingly Democratic Hollywood. Ronald Reagan had overcome the country’s prejudices by repackaging himself as the nativist, conservative, Knute Rockne, All American version of the Hollywood dream. He was the pioneer, and the master, of channeling celebrity for right-wing political purposes, just as John F. Kennedy had done it for liberal ones, albeit without having been a member of the Screen Actors Guild, of which both Reagan and Murphy had been president.
A major sign of the new times was that Reagan’s inaugural gala was being staged by the same man who had staged JFK’s glamorous kickoff exactly twenty years before, none other than Frank Sinatra. In 1961, Ol’ Blue Eyes, who at forty-five wasn’t all that old at the time, assembled a dream team of superstars to create the very first Hollywood inaugural. He had everyone from Sir Laurence Olivier to Louis Prima, Bette Davis to Keely Smith, Fredric March to Milton Berle, not to mention a phalanx of black talent that included Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier. The most conspicuously absent black superstar was Sinatra’s fellow Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr., who had been barred from the event by Big Daddy Joe Kennedy for marrying the Aryan Swedish goddess May Britt. Even Democrats had their limits. Now Ol’ Blue had become Ol’ Red, a Republican converso. With his new affiliation came a new appellation, Chairman of the Board, more appropriate to his new political party and to his seniority of sixty-five years. To Kennedy he brought Mahalia Jackson; to Reagan he brought Mister T.
Bloated and crowned with one of the worst toupees in a lifetime of cover-ups, the superstar introduced the television star of The A-Team, who looked like a psychedelic version of a sommelier in Brazzaville. In a foreshadowing of Reaganomics, Sinatra quipped that “if he decides to melt down all his gold chains, he could wipe out the national deficit.” Mister T bowed to Mister S and recalled that he had last been to the White House to play Santa Claus for Jimmy Carter, and now he was back. “Where else but in America,” he exulted, “can a black man from the ghetto play a white man from the North Pole?” He brought down the house of millionaires.
The big evening, held in a basketball arena in Landover, Maryland, home of the Washington Bullets, was like an extended television special, a middling night on Ed Sullivan. Johnny Carson co-emceed with Sinatra, but he wasn’t swinging for the fences. There was Rich Little, a Republican favorite for his impressions of Richard Nixon, who was surely having the last laugh tonight, though not here. There were Donny and Marie Osmond and Debby Boone and Mel Tillis, the stuttering country singer who had turned his impediment into stardom.
In addition to Mister T, there were numerous other awkward nods to black power, Republican style: Donny Osmond tried, in vain, to channel Chuck Berry by not quite duckwalking the stage and singing “Ronnie B. Goode.” Charley Pride channeled Hank Williams, after expressing his deep gratitude to “Miz Nancy” for inviting a poor Delta boy to this Holy Land. Ben Vereen, channeling Stepin Fetchit, put on a kind of minstrel show, covering his visage with a seemingly superfluous layer of blackface while singing (cringe) “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee.”
The only duplication from the Kennedy gala was Ethel Merman, unsinkable at seventy-three and way above and beyond party, belting out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Old Hollywood was represented, sparsely, by Charlton Heston, channeling Moses; by Bob Hope, still game at seventy-eight; and by James Stewart, then seventy-three, who had become a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Stewart stood proudly beside a real supergeneral, Omar Bradley, at eighty-seven the last of the five-star commanders. Dean Martin was in the front row, drunk. The press was not kind. One critic compared the show to Hee Haw (meow).
Here, in all its Republican lack of glory, was Hollywood taking over Washington. But whose Hollywood was it, anyway? Not the New Hollywood of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola, whose blockbusters were the only hope of rescuing a moribund feature film industry. Those auteurs were all Democrats, as were the so-called baby moguls, a bunch of ex–student radicals turned studio executives who were green-lighting offbeat fare like Animal House and Airplane!
No, the Hollywood that conquered Washington was the Hollywood of the second chance, the Hollywood of television, which was the new cash cow of entertainment. Look at Reagan himself. A basic B-actor turned TV presence was now commander in chief. It was big-time for Bonzo. The same thing was happening in the entertainment business: TV was taking over. B-actors and -actresses, finding themselves irrelevant on the big screen—which was itself in danger of becoming irrelevant unless it became even bigger—were getting remarkable resurrections on the small. Television was the reanimator. What F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about there being no second acts in American life was totally wrong. TV was the miracle. Ronald Reagan was Exhibit A.
The hunky heartland sportscaster had beaten long odds once to get a Warner Brothers contract, but then, despite entering the movie lexicon as “the Gipper,” he never became the Gable-level star he wanted to be, ending up on the tube in Death Valley Days. Furthermore, he was eclipsed, if not emasculated, by his first wife, Jane Wyman, who had won an Oscar for Johnny Belinda in 1948 at a time when Ronnie could barely get a role and ended up co-starring with a monkey. They divorced that year. Wyman, like her ex, would wind up on television on her own show, Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre, and ultimately on Falcon Crest, where she, too, was resurrected and won a Golden Globe.
Not even television could salvage the career of Nancy Reagan, who had re-created herself as a Republican social lioness. Quickly rebounding from Wyman, Reagan had remarried, in 1952, Nancy Davis, a Chicago society girl and a Smith College Seven Sister who had her own insuperable struggles in the thespian game. Before marrying security and class in her stepfather, a prominent if fanatic right-wing neurosurgeon, Nancy’s mother, Edith, was a struggling actress herself, who had abandoned Nancy to her sister so she could go on the road and chase her dream, which Nancy also inherited.
Using her mother’s showbiz connections, Nancy was able to get a screen test through Benny Thau, MGM’s resident casting gatekeeper and master of the quid pro quo. How much quid Nancy had to surrender for Benny’s quo cannot be known, but they did go out a lot. In the end, it came to naught but a few minor roles. Nancy was coming into the business in the early 1950s, a time when gentlemen preferred blond bombshells like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. No match for Grace Kelly or Eva Marie Saint in the social ice goddess department, Nancy was dismissed as a poor man’s Dina Merrill. Ironically, the best Dina Merrill, the genuine Post Toasties heiress, could do was marry Cliff Robertson, the man who played JFK (in PT 109), while Nancy’s husband would succeed JFK and make Nancy, the lost lady of Hollywood, the First Lady of America. The country liked comebacks and they liked winners, and the Reagans were providing it in spades.
Frank Sinatra had long ago made his comeback, from washed-up singer of novelty ditties with dogs (“Mama Will Bark”) to 1954 Oscar winner in From Here to Eternity. Now he was making his turnaround. No one could have ever been a bigger and better Democrat than the underdog, up from nothing Italian Hoboken crooner and civil rights champion whose mother, Dolly, had been a ward heeler. Sinatra liked to take credit, among his friends, for having done more to get his buddy John F. Kennedy elected (as well as laid) than anyone except maybe Sam Giancana, who was said to have “fixed Chicago” for JFK. Ah, that toddlin’ town.
But what one Kennedy giveth, another taketh away. Bluestocking Bobby, as much as he might have liked Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met through Sinatra, couldn’t stand the stain of Ol’ Blue’s gangland ties, particularly with Giancana. Although Sinatra had redecorated his Palm Springs estate to turn it into JFK’s informal western White House, Bobby put the nix on his brother’s travel plans and arranged for John to stay instead chez Bing Crosby. Crosby was Sinatra’s idol as well as his rival, and the unkindest cut of all was that he was also a Republican. Then again, so were a lot of stars, and not just John Wayne. Many of the giants were Republicans—Gable, Grant, Stewart, Mitchum, Holden, Hudson, plus Crosby’s Road partner, Hope, and Lucy and Desi, and even Elvis the King.
The great moguls who built the studios, Warner, Mayer, Goldwyn, despite thei...
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Sovereign Antitidote for January Gloom!
By Spirit of Milton Berle
I loved this book. It's like "Survivor" in Hollywood, with a Harvard sophisticate trying to survive among a mad tribe of starlet-flesh-eating Ferrari drivers. This is one of the best showbiz books ever written, a true life "What Makes Sammy Run." Funny, smart and true.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
"That was California, which was on the cutting edge, and this was America."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
America was fascinated with the movies but didn't so much like "liberal, Jewish, bleeding heart, foreign-seeming, and overwhelmingly Democratic Hollywood." This story opens in 1980 when Reagan was forming his "kitchen cabinet." A cabal of Republican best friends who coincidentally also ruled the newly minted Republican Hollywood.
This book reads more like a "Vanity Fair" story than a tabloid. Although the stories have some lurid content, the emphasis is not on the sensational, rather on the workings of excess behind the entertainment industry. The numerous cameos reveal humanizing elements of the wealthy, who are indeed different than we. Actually my favorite one occurs early in the book is about Nancy Reagan and her posse of blonde, chic, skinny blondes. The maitre d had to keep a cheat sheet with pictures to make sure he had the right power luncher.
This book offers an enticing look on now money, cronyism, and power entwine to dominate the movies and TV shows we all watch. The trail of money is deeply explored and the results are stranger than fact.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Funny, sexy, and informative
By John
[...]I loved it. Got a big kick out of the book. It woke me up to a world that I had never imagined was so complex. Plenty of Hollywood insights, bio's and the overall esoteria of Tinsel Town. Highly recommended, a fun trip
Freddy Bentivegna and John Bosnak (protege of Fred)
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem PDF
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem EPub
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem Doc
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem iBooks
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem rtf
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem Mobipocket
Moneywood: Hollywood in Its Last Age of Excess, by William Stadiem Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar